Road To VR On Open Versus Closed Metaverse And An Interview With Ebbe Altberg

Over at Road To VR there’s a post up by Kent Bye : Open vs Closed Metaverse: Project Sansar & The New Experiential Age. This is a dual media post as it contains text and an accompanying Podcast where Kent speaks to Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg. The interview took place at the Silicon Valley Virtual Reality (SVVR) Conference in April this year.

The text isn’t a rehash of the interview with Ebbe Altberg, it explores many deep issues and concerns regarding Virtual Reality, information and whether walled gardens or open systems are the best approach. There’s some fascinating discussion material here. For example when it comes to the trade in the Information Age between users and providers, Kent writes :

One of the primary business models of The Information Age has been that information is freely available, and that it’s supported by ads. There’s an explicit agreement that authenticated users are volunteering to be tracked and surveilled by companies in exchange for all of this free content and social connections that they are enabling.

There’s a lot of discussion here, I am not a fan of the way data is shared and collected by many platforms, but I accept that in exchange for access, I need to give up some information about myself. This is an exchange, it’s not a free lunch.

Kent goes further and talks about how with VR we can embrace the Experiential Age, which has a different trade :

While there’s a level of consent for data that we are explicitly sharing on websites within the context of the Information Age, the Experiential Age is going to be tracking behavioral and biometric data that is a lot more unconscious but yet still revealing. Virtual Reality has the capability to gather an enormous amount of biometric data ranging from our heart rate data, our emotional states, identifiable body language cues extrapolated from head and hand tracking, and eventually our eye-tracked “attention” for what we’re looking at and getting impressed by.

While we have had no real pause with sharing abstracted information with companies, then perhaps we will be more cautious about what type of unconscious medical data from our bodies that we’re willing to share with companies. That means that Facebook, Google, or Linden Lab could start to save vast repositories of personal biometric data that could become a target for governments or hackers.

This is meaty stuff and deserves to be read in full at Kent’s article.

The walled garden versus Open Systems debate is one that has raged on for quite some time, Kent explains :

The walled garden versus open web is a debate has played out on the World Wide Web since the early days of AOL and CompuServe when the balance of power was concentrated within a handful of walled gardens sites. Then the ugly HTML pages become more interconnected, and it was this linking between documents that ultimately provided more value according to Metcalfe’s Law. This was a victory for the decentralized open web, but now there seems to be a reconsolidating of power into a small handful of social media, technology, and entertainment websites. Will VR experiences and the evolution of the interconnected Metaverse experience a similar trajectory of Closed, Open, and then Closed again?

Second Life is of course a walled garden, although it has many open aspects once you’re inside it. By this I mean that you can go to a medieval roleplaying region, a Science Fiction area or just hangout if you want. There are plenty of things to do within the walled garden.

Long ago there was talk of Second Life being part of a larger open metaverse with OpenSim, that didn’t happen and it’s something I’ve covered more than once, here for example : Virtual World Interoperability Is Still One Giant Step Away For VR.

Interoperability between Second Life and OpenSim was achieved, as exemplified in this video :

However the potential was never fully realised, which many believe was a missed opportunity.

The Interview with Ebbe is also worth listening to if you have time, it comes in at just under 50 minutes and discusses some of the issues Kent raises in article with regards to Open versus Closed models.

Ebbe also discusses why Project Sansar will be different to Second Life because the idea behind Sansar is that you will go to the experience, not Project Sansar. Therefore it will be the experience that is the focus of someone’s visit, such as going to class, rather than going into a class in Second Life, you will be going to a class running Project Sansar technology.

There’s a lot of extremely interesting discussion here and for fans of Virtual Worlds and Virtual Reality, it’s well worth finding the time to read the article and listen to the podcast.